He stood for a moment, gone from the chest up, and then the smoking ruins of his body collapsed sideways, over the edge of the dock, bounced off the nose carapace of the nearest skimmer and slid into the water with a flat splash.

Something tiny stabbed up under my ribs. A small noise came seeping up through me and I locked it down behind my teeth. I spun, weaponless in the direction the blast had come from.

Jadwiga stepped out of a doorway in the baling station. From somewhere she’d got hold of Murakami’s plasmafrag rifle, or one very like it.

She held it propped upright on her hip. The heat haze still shimmered around the muzzle.

“I take it you’ve not got a problem with that,” she called across the breeze and the dead quiet between us.

I closed my eyes and stood there, just breathing.

It didn’t help.

EPILOGUE

From the deck of Haiduci’s Daughter, the coastline of Kossuth fades to a low charcoal line astern. Tall, ugly clouds are still just visible further south where the storm blunders about the western end of the Expanse, losing force in the shallow waters and dying. The forecasts are for calm seas and sunshine all the way north.

Japaridze reckons he could get us to Tekitomura in record time, and he’d happily do it for the money we’ve paid him. But a sudden sprint north from an ageing freight hoverloader would probably just get us noticed, and that’s not what we need right now. The slow, commonplace commercial rhythm of the stopping route up the western coast of the Saffron Archipelago makes afar better cover. And timing is the key.

Somewhere, I know, there’s an investigation ripping through the corridors of power in Millsport. The Envoy ops auditors have been needlecast in and are picking over the scant debris of Murakami’s covert operation. But like the fading storm on the Expanse, it isn’t going to touch us. We’ve got time, if we’re lucky all the time we need. The Qualgrist virus is creeping steadily through the global population and the threat it poses will drive the Harlan family out of their aristo flesh and back into the datastacks with their ancestors. The power vacuum their withdrawal creates at the centre of things will suck the rest of the First Families oligarchy into a political maelstrom that they’ll handle badly, and then things will begin to fall apart. The yakuza, the haiduci and the Protectorate will circle like bottlebacks around a weakened elephant ray, waiting for outcome and watching each other. But they won’t move yet, any of them.